


Fourteen, and four thousand, years old

by kineticallyanywhere



Category: RWBY
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, literary experiments of two people one brain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:00:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22722823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kineticallyanywhere/pseuds/kineticallyanywhere
Summary: (Post volume five) Oscar and Ozpin pass out after the battle of Haven. Oscar wakes up and his thoughts are pretty scrambled. Qrow of all people figures out the right perspective.
Relationships: Ozpin & Oscar Pine, Qrow Branwen & Oscar Pine
Comments: 9
Kudos: 218





	Fourteen, and four thousand, years old

**Author's Note:**

> (first posted on tumblr)  
> Wrote this mostly after volume 5 came out, forgot about it for like a year at a time, decided I liked it too much to sit on it, and then finally finished it because I stand by the descriptions I have (specifically about how merging with Oz affects Oscar, from Oscar’s perspective). It was a lot of fun writing the kind of thought-paradox that might come with sharing a brain, especially when the line between who’s thoughts belong to who should be clear, but isn’t.

Oscar’s pretty sure he at least gets out the word “Atlas”.

Then everything goes quiet. 

__  
_ _

Blessedly quiet. 

__  
_ _

“…dn’t…”

“…s he okay? It’s bee…”

“…sing his body for half the fight. Took out of ‘em both. Jus… ome time.”

Soft. Something’s soft. 

“…at this rate. Are we gonna have to carry him to the train?”

Ow. Pain, something hurts. 

“It’s not like he’s very big.”

Everything hurts. Heavy. Why does he feel so heavy? 

“I mean, maybe if it was just Oscar, but ima… zpin around.”

“That’s…”

“If it comes to it, I’ll carry ‘im. Big babies.”

Qrow. Lifting his head off the pillow to clear both eyes to open takes work. He feels it all the way down to his shoulder blade. He takes the inch he can get and tries to see who’s next to him. It’s all a blur. Has he even opened his eyes? “Qrow?“ 

A hand rests on his shoulder. It kind of doesn’t hurt. Oscar’s head hurts. Pounding behind the bridge of his nose. For a moment he thinks the red eyes he sees must be his own. No, his eyes are brown– No. His eyes are hazel now. His eyes hurt, too. The room has gone silent. 

“Go back to sleep, kid,” Qrow says. Ozpin is silent; How can Qrow tell?

He is Ozpin though, and he is awake. He hurts. But that doesn’t matter, what matters is, “Atlas…”

“We’re already on it.” Oh, good. Oscar did manage to say it before. 

“We’re gonna get you there in one piece, too,” a lighter voice says. Oscar’s head loses its inch from the pillow. His eyes - hazel, but so dry - slide to the person crouched next to him.”You’ve got nothing to worry about,” she promises. 

Promises… he’s seen her faces a thousand times. She’s a warrior. She has so many friends. She’s alive and well. She’s dead. Is that his fault, too? Probably. 

“Summer…” is all he can say, and Oscar has no idea (some idea) who that is. 

And then everything is quiet again. 

__  
_ _

Blessedly quiet. 

__  
_ _

Nothing hurts. 

__  
_ _

…his hands sting. 

He’s pretty sure he’s sitting up now, leaning sideways against something. His clothes are soft. Not… not well worn soft, more like new soft. He’s pretty sure Ozpin is the one who knows what that feels like. 

Opening his eyes is easier this time. He sees he’s leaning on fabric that is folded around an arm shape. Green and black and a bit of pink. Hands folded in a lap. Legs on a couch, feet on the floor. The room is darker this time, and yet the air is lighter. There’s quiet laughter across the room and cricket chirping beyond a wall. 

Ozpin is silent. 

“Ren?” Oscar asks for instead. 

The shoulder he’s leaning on shifts a little, but Oscar doesn’t want to lift his head from it. 

“Oscar?” Ren asks quietly in return. Whatever other conversation is in the room continues easily without him. He and Oscar go unnoticed. 

Oscar’s eyes gravitate down towards his own hands, his own clothes. He’s wearing a clean white shirt and baggy grey pants that he doesn’t recognize. His palms are stuck with bandaids – his gloves are gone. The cane is different from a shovel, his own memory supplies. He runs his fingertips across the textured fabric pulling at his skin. He wiggles his toes and feels it there, too. Running up walls is different from rounding up chickens. 

Ren is wonderfully patient. 

“Did I wake up before?” Oscar asks. No depressed tones hang in this air. There’s no worry or panic, if only for now. He recognizes the scent of a tea Oscar knows he’s never encountered before. 

“A few times,” Ren tells him. He waits even more moments for Oscar to process what that means. Other than the idea that maybe he had changed his own clothes, he doesn’t. Eventually Ren asks, “Are you hungry?”

Oscar feels very heavy. Something in his chest feels smaller, yet crowded, and something weaves across and around his skin like air but warmer. Heavier. Like more than it should be. It’s not a bad feeling. He feels like more than he’s been before, just a little. 

The band aids are lighter than his skin tone. Have they always been like that? 

Ren reaches a hand across himself to place over Oscar’s. Oscar stops pressing at the bandaids. His hands sting. He misses when his cane was familiar to his hands. 

“You should sleep,” Ren suggests softly. He says most things softly. 

Oscar’s eyes are already closed. “Okay…” he says. 

__  
_ _

Everything is quiet. 

__  
_ _

Quiet. And light. And heavy? Light and heavy. And hot. Oscar’s eyes are closed but his head is spinning but he feels like he’s sinking. Like something intangible is contracting inside of him, pushing together and leaving him exposed. Cold. Hot. Tired. 

Oscar is so tired. 

There’s a feeling on his shoulder. 

“…aura got really weak all of a sudden. I thought– I thought maybe–”

“No, you’re doing good, kid. Keep at it.”

Something falls over him, starting at his shoulder. Like a sheet of smooth water rolling over him and hugging him like a blanket. When he lifts his eyelids, he can see it. It’s light green and feels cozy. It feels safe. Whatever was pushing inside Oscar’s chest decides to take a break for today and carefully releases. 

Tonight? This morning? Evening? What day is it? 

Qrow is there again. And Jaune, whose hands are glowing. Nora hovers behind them, swinging on her toes. She catches eyes with Oscar and gives a remarkably false smile. Oscar’s eyes slip shut without permission. 

“Take your time, ‘kay Os?” she says. 

Oscar makes a noise through his mouth which he doesn’t open. 

__  
_ _

And then it’s quiet. 

__  
_ _

It’s still quiet when he becomes aware of himself. He’s sitting up again, but leaning at an angle that he doesn’t want to leave. Everything’s quiet save for the sound of someone shuffling close by. Something _ting-ting-tings_ softly. 

_**Oscar?**_

It’s not startling at all, as if he prepared the breath himself even though nothing was said out loud. 

_Ozpin?_

Was that a question, or a confirmation? 

The voice that sounds like Ozpin says, _**Are we alright?**_

His jaw feels stiff and his voice dry as he says, “Are we?”

Another dry voice says, from outside, “Kid?”

Oscar blinks his eyes and floats his head upright. He’d been leaning against the wings of a fluffy armchair. The room he finds himself in is unfamiliar, but the style still feels like Mistral, with long thin lines and dark, warm, tones. The other person in the room is much more familiar. Qrow has himself folded between the foot of Oscar’s chair and the coffee table, where he’s setting a spoon next to a warming plate with two mugs on top. Oscar’s chair isn’t very tall, and Qrow is a small mountain even on the floor, so their difference in eye level isn’t even that wide. 

Qrow is a mess of a human being, as far as Oscar can tell, but his presence is always assuring. The other children must be fine if they’re not here and he is. 

“Hey,” Oscar greets. 

Qrow gives a small smile. “Hey there, Wizard. How ya feeling?" 

Oscar assesses. Slowly. He sits up properly and rubs his eyes. He’s faintly sore. A blanket falls onto his lap. He remembers the fight for the relic, he remembers Ozpin going quiet, he remembers being safe, he remembers…

Ironwood will be upset. When isn’t he, nowadays? 

“A little blurry,” he decides. 

Qrow nods like that’s a perfectly reasonable answer. He reaches for the mugs. “Coffee or hot chocolate?” he asks. 

“Hot chocolate?“ The words feel new to his tongue. 

Qrow’s eyebrows raise. “You never have hot chocolate, kid?" 

“I…” No. They didn’t have a lot for small, one-time, luxuries on the farm. “Not since Beacon.”

They both know Oscar’s never been to Beacon. The teacher’s lounge always had a stash of cocoa powder. 

Qrow hands him one of the mugs without comment, for which Oscar is grateful, and takes a drink out of the other. The mug is warm, but the band aids on Oscar’s palms block the worst of the heat. 

Hot chocolate is Oscar’s new favorite thing. Everything feels all warm inside. He feels his whole body slowly start waking up with him. He wiggles his toes and feels the rub of fabric between them. He pulls his feet onto the chair with him to get a look and finds several more band aids on the balls of his feet and one on the back of his left heel. 

“Looks like you’ve still got some work to do, farm boy,” Qrow tells him lightly. 

Oscar groans. Fighting… wasn’t terrible. At least not until Ozpin took over and sent Oscar’s head spinning to understand how he could keep up with everything that was happening. Then Ozpin had let his grip slip off the controls and it had taken everything Oscar had to not black out on the spot. 

Qrow puts a hand on his knee and swings it back and forth. “It’ll get easier.”

That’s what he’s afraid of. 

“How long was I asleep?“ Oscar asks. 

“It’s been a couple days since the battle,” Qrow answers. He lets Oscar’s knee go but keeps his arm leaning on the chair. “The kids have been pretty worried. You’ve woken up a handful of times. Do you remember?" 

Oscar humms uncertainty. “A couple times.” 

“Yeah I had the feeling you weren’t quite with us. You remember changing clothes?”

Oscar shakes his head and picks at his shirt.

“You, uh… didn’t miss much.”

That clearly wasn’t true, but Oscar lets him have it, and a gulp of his coffee. Oscar turns his own attention to his hot chocolate. It’s already half-empty. Figures he’d be thirsty, he guesses. 

“You spiked a fever last night, outta nowhere. Jaune super-boosted your aura and it came down, but the whole ordeal put some of the other kids on edge.”

That won’t do. They’d all just had a major victory, the children need every reassurance they can get, not more aspects to worry over given by the very people they are just starting to put their trust in. 

Oscar is also a kid. Oscar would also like some reassurance. 

“You okay, Wizard?”

Oscar realizes he’s been quiet for a while. “I just…” Oscar closes his eyes, which skews his sense of balance, but the simple loss of input spares him some focus to form a sentence. It feels like he has two lines of logic running at the same time, but each one alternates which one is making statements, so that every string of thought he forms in his brain ends up contradicting itself. Oscar’s been sick before, but nothing ever made him feel like this. This was familiar, though; something from a long time ago. Oscar hasn’t lived a long time. Not yet. He will have. Soon. 

Oscar’s head feels light and wobbly. He holds it in one hand, and it stops the world from swaying a little. The two lines of logic agree on one thing, at least. “I have a lot in my head.”

Qrow’s hand takes his ankle this time. It’s grounding. “Oz didn’t give us all the gritty details about how this works, but from the way he talked about it - the whole merging thing - this is how it’s supposed to go.”

That’s what Oscar’s afraid of. 

“What I mean is: you’ll live. It’ll get easier, and this phase’ll pass. You’re gonna be okay. “

Oscar notices his hands shaking. He wishes he had more hot chocolate. Maybe some coffee. Oscar doesnt want coffee. He wants… he wants… 

A dark spot appears on the bandaid wrapped around the inside of his hand 

He can’t get his voice to come out steady as he asks, “But will I still be me?" 

Oscar doesn’t want to stop being himself. He doesn’t want to turn into somebody else. He doesn’t want to lose bits of who he is, one inch at a time, until someone else takes over. He doesn’t want to disappear. 

_**Oh, Oscar…**_

Oscar both wants to sink into whatever comfort Ozpin has to offer, and to push him away with everything he has. Not that any amount of pushing would get him very far. 

Then Qrow says, “Are you any less you than you were two months ago?”

Oscar looks up at him. He blinks some tears out of the way. “Huh?” is all he can process to say. 

“In the last two months, you got on a train, you’ve met huntsman and huntresses - hell, you’ve even fought most of ‘em. You’ve got new friends, new memories, new experiences; but you’re still you, yeah? You just punch better and maybe know a few more things.”

“A few is an understatement.” Maidens, relics, gods, wizards, huntsmen, magic? Sure. A few things. “But I… yeah?” Or at least he didn’t feel like he wasn’t himself.

“You’re gonna start remembering more and more as this goes. In a really, pretty short amount of time, you’ll basically be experiencing everything that Oz - and whoever he was before that, and before that - experienced. You’ll be gaining experiences, just like you have been these last two months. It’s up to you–” Qrow poked him on the forehead “–whether or not you let those experiences change you. How they change you.”

Oscar’s vision gets blurry again, but his heart doesn’t pound quite so hard.

“I won’t pad this for you, you will be different. But that doesn’t mean you won’t be you.”

Ozpin doesn’t say anything, but there’s no denial in that silence. No hidden corner or softened edge for Oscar’s sake (there have been a few of those). Only reassurance. Wherever this goes, they’ll go together 

Oscar rubs the back of his hand over his eyes. Sniffs self-consciously. “Thanks,” he says. 

Qrow, mortifyingly, ruffles Oscar’s hair, seriousness falling away again. “Any time, kiddo.”

And then the door bursts open, ricocheting off the wall and nearly giving them both a heart attack. Nora stands in the doorway, the bottom of a cup still pressed to one ear. She makes determined and excited eye contact with him and shouts, “Oscar!” Then she leans back down the hall, door frame clutched in her fingers, to proclaim, “ _OSCAR’S AWAKE!_ ”

A burst of red rose petals and then Ruby’s there. “Oh, thank goodness, are you okay?”

Oscar barely gets the words, “I’ll be fine,” out of his mouth before Ruby sags all the way to the floor in relief. 

“That is the _least_ stressful thing I’ve heard all day. You would not believe the things Blake has been telling us about Menagerie and her house catching fire and– oh!” Just like that, she’s on her feet again. “Oh my gosh! You have to meet Blake! I’ll–”

Before she can finish the next sentence, Nora has body-checked her across the room and taken her place. 

Seriously, she says, “Be straight with me, Oscar. Where does it hurt? Did you pull any muscles? What’s the weirdest dream you had? How many fingers am I holding up?”

Oscar looks nervously between her and her hand. “That’s a fist,” he tells her. 

Now Nora sighs with relief. “Phew.” Towards the hall, she shouts, “Looks like we don’t need the defibrillator, Ren!”

Just like that, Ren is in the doorway. “No one thought we’d need a defibrillator.” 

Then Jaune pokes his head in the doorway. He’s got his scroll up to one ear and a hand over the receiver. “We’re sure?”

He hasn’t called paramedics, has he?

Qrow asks him, “Who are you on the scroll with?”

“The pizza place down the street, you want any?” Jaune says. 

They get more pizza than they can eat in a day. Nora compensates for their weaknesses. Weiss makes more hot cocoa. Yang tells excellent sleepover stories. Blake has a very broad taste in book genres. They have a calm night. An easy night. They all know what’s coming, but until the sun rises again, the air is light. 

Oscar’s mind is quiet, the rest of that day. He’s not sure when his thoughts straightened out or the fog cleared away for a while. For a while he, unrealizng, makes the mistake of thinking himself alone in his own head. For a short time, he is only Oscar, and only a kid. 

Later, on a cold street in Argus, he suddenly understands why he’s known this feeling before. Why he recognizes that feeling–of single-mindedness, of solitude–and can articulate what it is. He is only Oscar, and only a kid. (But he won’t be, not forever.) 

It’s horribly quiet.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading!


End file.
